Over the past two decades, China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia have been engaged in unprecedented efforts to recast and rapidly expand the legal profession—with profound implications not only for law, but also for politics, international relations, and society itself. Raising the Bar is the first book-length study in English of this phenomenon. It examines a broad range of topics, including changes underway in the profession’s size and composition, its evolving relationship to state authority, the outlet it may be providing for historically disadvantaged sectors of society, and its impact on economic and political development. The book also explores the implications of these findings for broader theoretical work about both the legal profession and globalization. Contributors include William Alford, Yves Dezalay, Bryant Garth, Ryo Hamano, JaeWon Kim, Toshimitsu Kitagawa, Daniel Lev, Benjamin Liebman, Setsuo Miyazawa, Luke Nottage, Sang-Hyun Song, and Jane Kaufman Winn.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent mass displacement of black neighborhoods in New Orleans, black queer performers redefined notions of belonging throughout the city. These unlikely figures, such as artists Big Freedia and Vockah Redu, played a significant role in calling the displaced back home and serving as beacons of hope. In Raising the Bottom, Alix Chapman engages in performance ethnography, taking to the stage while writing about the lives of these bounce artists and their extended community. He theorizes an epistemology of the bottom—a way of knowing, praxis, and aesthetic—which contests hierarchies of value that place black and queer bodies at the lowest rungs of the social ladder. By engaging in this bottom episteme, bounce performers leverage pleasure and coalition to transform collectives not meant to survive crisis and disaster. Raising the Bottom shows how black queer artists address, remix, and redirect stereotypes to amplify community power, pleasure, and solidarity.

A rich history of the development of American minimum wage policy with lessons for today.

Despite broad popular support for robust minimum wage policy, the federal minimum wage is now worth less—in real, inflation-adjusted terms—than at any time since 1949. While some state and local governments have stepped in to fill this void, others have declined to set any minimum wage standard at all. Traversing more than 100 years of history, Raising the Floor examines how interest groups have navigated the highly decentralized American political system to shape the development of federal, state, and local minimum wage laws.

In her analysis, Shanna Rose highlights the importance of American federalism. She argues that because federalism creates multiple arenas for policy change, interest groups have sought out the sites most conducive to their goals, shifting their lobbying efforts as new obstacles and opportunities emerge. Federalism has facilitated minimum wage policymaking by fostering policy experimentation, learning, and diffusion across states and by allowing state and local governments to overcome gridlock and status-quo biases at the national level. Yet, federalism has also been an instrument for containment, enabling those opposed to minimum wage increases to litigate and preempt local-level laws.

With rich historical chapters that illuminate different phases in the development of today’s patchwork of wage standards, Raising the Floor is a deep examination of the past, present, and future of American minimum wage law.

An eye-opening look at how incarcerated people, health professionals, and others behind and beyond bars came together to problem-solve incarceration.
 
Raising the Living Dead is a history of Puerto Rico’s carceral rehabilitation system that brings to life the interactions of incarcerated people, their wider social networks, and health care professionals. Alberto Ortiz Díaz describes the ways that multiple communities of care came together both inside and outside of prisons to imagine and enact solution-oriented cultures of rehabilitation from the 1930s to the 1960s. Scientific and humanistic approaches to well-being were deliberately fused to raise the “living dead,” an expression that reemerged in the modern Caribbean to refer to prisoners. These reform groups sought to raise incarcerated people physically, mentally, socially, spiritually, and civically.
 
The book is based on deep, original archival research into the Oso Blanco (White Bear) penitentiary in Puerto Rico, yet it situates its study within Puerto Rico’s broader carceral archipelago and other Caribbean prisons. The agents of this history include not only physical health professionals, but also psychologists and psychiatrists, social workers, spiritual and religious practitioners, and, of course, the prisoners and their families. By following all these groups and emphasizing the interpersonal exercise of power, Ortiz Díaz tells a story that goes beyond debates about structural and social control.
 
The book addresses key issues in the history of prisons and the histories of medicine and belief, including how prisoners’ different racial, class, and cultural identities shaped their incarceration and how professionals living in a colonial society dealt with the challenge of rehabilitating prisoners for citizenship.
 
Raising the Living Dead is not just about convicts, their immediate interlocutors, and their contexts, however, but about how together these open a window into the history of social uplift projects within the (neo)colonial societies of the Caribbean. There is no book like this in Caribbean historiography; few examine these themes in the larger literature on the history of prisons.

Raising the Tents follows one woman as she plumbs her depths, and retrieves her own voice on her journey to find meaning and wholeness. Adler’s personal mythology evolves from a belief in the possibility for change and from a Jewish heritage emphasizing ancestry. She explores the silencing of women and reveals the empowering effects of finding and claiming our voices. In remembering pogroms and the Holocaust, and her childhood in an alcoholic home, she bears witness against “a world malnourished by its insistence on dominance as a way of life.”

After World War II, American organizations launched efforts to improve the lives of foreign children, from war orphans in Europe and Japan to impoverished youth in the developing world. Providing material aid, education, and emotional support, these programs had a deep humanitarian underpinning. But they were also political projects. Sara Fieldston’s comprehensive account Raising the World shows that the influence of child welfare agencies around the globe contributed to the United States’ expanding hegemony. These organizations filtered American power through the prism of familial love and shaped perceptions of the United States as the benevolent parent in a family of nations.

The American Friends Service Committee, Foster Parents’ Plan, and Christian Children’s Fund, among others, sent experts abroad to build nursery schools and orphanages and to instruct parents in modern theories of child rearing and personality development. Back home, thousands of others “sponsored” overseas children by sending money and exchanging often-intimate letters. Although driven by sincere impulses and sometimes fostering durable friendships, such efforts doubled as a form of social engineering. Americans believed that child rearing could prevent the rise of future dictators, curb the appeal of communism, and facilitate economic development around the world.

By the 1970s, child welfare agencies had to adjust to a new world in which American power was increasingly suspect. But even as volunteers reconsidered the project of reshaping foreign societies, a perceived universality of children’s needs continued to justify intervention by Americans into young lives across the globe.